The Englishman (66 page)

“And you would really move to the UK?” It is the oldest among my interviewers, a man with an almost-white beard and a red bowtie, who seems skeptical.

I was prepared for the question, but none of my prepared answers seem appropriate.

“Yes. Yes, I would.”

“Anna has flown in from the States.” Ewan Buchanan comes to my aid. “Surely that speaks for her motivation!”

“I’m sure her motives are most honorable,” Professor Simpson agrees. “I would like to have them explained to me, that’s all.”

I have a job. I don’t need to lie.

“Well, sir, I spent five of the past ten years in England, and by and large they were the better years, personally and professionally.”

He waits for more.

“The truth is, I think I would be more productive living in England. And happier.”

Back at Heathrow I have that bizarre feeling at the end of a holiday that I only just arrived two days ago. Bored with the trashy novels on the shelves of W. H. Smith, I select a volume about British country houses up for sale and in need of refurbishment. That will keep me dreaming on the flight.

“Anna?” a male voice addresses me. “Anna! What are the odds!”

So lost am I in thought that it takes me several seconds to recognize the burly, bouncy redhead. Paul French has been to see his children and his mother and is waiting for his flight back to Chicago. He suggests coffee, and I don’t see how I can refuse.

“It’s amazing how fast you can get from London to New York these days! You’ll be making the trip more often in future, won’t you?” he says significantly. “Maybe you should get yourself a job in the old country, too. Mind you, pay-wise, that’s bad advice, and so I told Giles. I earn heaps more at Notre Dame than I did in the UK.”

For a moment or two I’m too confused to answer.

“Have I put my foot in it?” he asks, pulling a face of contrition. “Forget that I—”

“What do you mean, Paul?”

“No, no, he obviously didn’t…well, I assumed Giles would have mentioned it.”

“Is Giles going back to England?” I sound calm, but Paul French is no fool.

“Look, I assumed—”

“Where?” As if that was the point. But I’m too frightened to ask
when.

“They’ve offered him my old job at UCL. That’s why he came to see me at Notre Dame, to discuss the offer. God, Anna, I’m so sorry, I assumed he told you! Don’t tell him I—”

“I won’t tell him you told me,” I say slowly, thinking fast. “Don’t worry. I won’t say a word.”

Chapter 39

T
HE
F
IRST
T
HING
I D
O
W
HEN
I G
ET
H
OME
—no, wait, let me rephrase that. The first thing I do when I return to the cottage on the farm is check each room for evidence of interference, but everything seems to be as I left it. The rocking chair sits in a corner of the study looking as if the previous tenants had forgotten it. Then I call the main house on the phone, but no one picks up. The moment I put the phone down, it rings. Caught out, I automatically pick up.

“You’re back.”

“Got in twenty minutes ago.”

“Can I see you?”

I breathe and try to be mindful of the intense and ambivalent feelings raging in my stomach. He will have left this country by the summer. I can risk having an affair with someone who will only be here for another few months.
Can
I risk it?

Why didn’t he tell me?

Why the hell does Giles never tell me things?

I could have sex with Giles Cleveland today. Do I want to, or not? Simple, really.

He turns up on my doorstep less than fifteen minutes later, more handsome than ever, and very cautious, careful not to overwhelm me, but raring to go. He dutifully enquires after my journey and my jetlag, and I could play hard to get, but I don’t want to tease him. I want to pummel him and shout my disappointment at him, but I do not want to tease. My orgasms are powerful and effortless; vaguely I wonder why this is. Maybe because, for all his impatience, Giles is a very attentive lover, watching me, making sure of me, enjoying my pleasure even more than his own. Maybe it is because my body, remembering and anticipating its hopeless yearning for his, melts into the present moment without reserve or reservation. If I’m going to crash this plane, I’ll do it full throttle, in free fall. During some desultory talk between two bouts of sex and the soup and homemade bread that Giles pulls out of a basket like a male Red Riding Hood, I casually mention that I bumped into Paul French at the airport.

“Which airport?” he asks, frowning.

“Heathrow.” I pause for a reaction, but his face is blank again. “I was in England. To see friends.”

“You didn’t say.”

“No, I didn’t.”

He was quick to suspect Paul of having tattled, but Giles is not a man quick to speak. So we eat, both of us withdrawn and a little wary of each other, and I wonder how we are ever going to sort ourselves out.

Afterward—showered, wined and fed—I zonk out on the sofa.

“I suppose you’d like me to leave you to it now.” Giles is leaning in the open doorway.

“I’m sorry, Giles. It’s more that I can’t really ask you to stay. I have nothing more to offer today…”

“You’re still on English time. It’s the wee small hours for you.”

“That’s certainly what it feels like.” I can hardly keep my eyes open, and being snuggled up under my quilt doesn’t help. Exhaustion is a plausible reason to push him away. “Anyway, you have the dogs to look after!”

“They’re sleeping at a friend’s house.” He is still leaning in the door, watching me.

“Are they having a pajama party?”

He comes over, sits down at the bottom of the sofa and slips his hands under the quilt to find my woolly feet. Edging closer, he pulls them onto his lap and starts kneading them. His fingers inch higher, pushing up the legs of my pajamas.

“Giles, really…I’m totally knackered.” I try to pull my left foot out of his grip, but his fingers are surprisingly strong around my ankle.

“Not to worry. I’ll get my money’s worth.”

“
Money’s worth?”

“Shhhh…”

I’m too tired to make a scene. If he won’t take a hint, let him sit there and massage my calves; he won’t get any more sex out of me tonight. I have a heartache.

“Horrible man,” I murmur before I drop off.

I wake up confused and annoyed. Too groggy to recall my dream. It aroused me and I want to go on dreaming, but some commotion woke me. My quilt and my pajama pants tangled, legs naked. Butt naked.

“Giles! What are you—no! Don’t
do
that!”

He raises his head from between my thighs. “Why not?”

I hadn’t encouraged him to return the favors that I enjoy doing for him, and he hadn’t insisted; I assumed that we both preferred it that way.

“I thought you didn’t…well, you haven’t…”

Without breaking eye contact in the dim light of the reading lamp, he runs the tip of his tongue around my clit, then gently pulls it into his mouth and suckles it.

“I’m just shy,” he informs me.

I try to cover myself up, clutch, ineffectually, at my blanket, and try to push his head away, but if this is to be the first time I refuse sex to him, I must be more awake. And more determined. When I yank at the silky hair between my fingers—I can’t remember whether it was to pull him closer or to pull him off—his fingers feel for mine, tenderly at first, but then they are like a vise around my wrist and secure my arm between my hip and the seat of the sofa so that I am trapped by my own weight. His other hand comes for my other wrist and clasps it in a way that allows no resistance.

“Relax,” he murmurs.

His fingers slip over my eyes, light and warm…God, I’m so tired…then they are back on my hips, my thighs, pressing into my flesh, massaging the strands of muscle into uselessness. I rear up when the slow, soft caress of his lips and tongue becomes more insistent; I try to struggle, but he shoves his hands underneath me so that his fingers can clamp my elbows to my sides and my knees are forced apart by his shoulders. So wide open. Panic.

“Giles—I don’t like this!”

“Yes, you do.”

Unfolding me, unfurling me layer by twitching layer, Giles draws nearer to my core.

For what seems like hours I drift into and out of sleep, floating in a warm, slow stream that occasionally runs faster, more turbulently, and I tense up, subconsciously fighting against the undertow. Then I give in. Even when I’m sucked under, I do not drown. Finally I emerge, gasping for breath, climaxing against his mouth with long, soft, fluid contractions.

He waits till I am done; his lips are warm and slow on the damp skin of my belly. Never in my life have I been more deeply sated. Every fiber, every cell in my body is limp with the exhaustion that comes after long and intense stimulation.

“No! Oh, G-Giles, no, I c-can’t!”

“Yes, you can.”

He settles himself between my wet thighs and slides into me. I’m too weak even to scream, although his cock pierces me with a thrust of exquisite torture, as if my whole body were a sheath of nerve endings. I manage to clamp my arms and legs around him, to have something to hold onto, to stop my chest from exploding. He makes no attempts at finesse now; a few minutes, and he lies on top of me, heavy, surely uncomfortable on the sofa that is just long enough for me. With my arms around him and my fingers in his hair, damp at the nape, I think of newborn babies, squidgy with goo, resting on their mothers’ sweat-drenched breasts.

Tears run out of the corners of my eyes, into my ears, onto the cushion.

He lifts his head.

“Is it something Paul French said?” he murmurs.

And now I’m sobbing helplessly, hopelessly, stunned with the loss of him who is still inside me.

Chapter 40

G
ILES
M
UST
H
AVE
C
ARRIED
M
E
over into the bedroom. At least that is where I wake up, and I doubt I would have been able to walk there. My wrist watch on the bedside table says half past seven, but it takes me an age to figure out whether it is morning or evening and whether I’m on Greenwich Mean Time or Eastern Standard Time.

I am alone in my bed, but like a lover in a movie, he has left a note.

Gone to pick up the dogs. Thank you for last night. G.

It takes me another six hours to get up, partly because I feel as if I had swum across the Atlantic instead of flown across, partly because I don’t want to wake up and think about the biggest mess I have ever got myself into. So much do I not want to think about being Giles’s farewell fling before he leaves for University College, London, that all other chores seem attractive.

Karen answers the phone, and I ask her to come over as soon as is convenient. My voice must have sounded ominous, because ten minutes later she knocks on the door.

“Sorry to make you trudge through the slush, Karen, but I suspect you may not want witnesses.”

I prepared myself for a confrontation, but she denies nothing and grows very quiet.

“I’m sorry, Anna.” She plays with the handle of her teacup, and I notice how tired she looks. Christmas is never a relaxing time for mothers.

“Is there more?” I say after a pause. “I had hoped you’d be sorry, but—is that all?”

“You took the key off her? That’s good. Hold onto it, hide it somewhere in the shack, but hide it well.”

“Karen!”

She sighs and hides her eyes behind her hand for a moment.

“Why do you think the previous tenants left?” She waits for me to catch on. “When they found out, they went straight to Howard. I don’t blame them! You will, too, and I don’t blame you, either! But I can’t stop her. I have no control over her.” Karen’s lips tremble, but she won’t cry in front of me. “You can’t imagine the row we had over it. But she can’t resist the pickers. They make her feel important and…grown up, I guess.”

“But, Karen, at this rate she’ll end up pregnant before she’s finished school! You don’t want her to end up—”

“Like me?” she says bitterly. “It seems inevitable. I’ll get her on the pill, now that she’s sixteen. I don’t know what else to do.”

Her defeatist attitude makes me angry, but I have no solution ready, and the longer I reflect on her situation, the more I see how complicated it is.

“There must be something you can do!” I finally say, lamely.

“Take her and move out?” Karen’s smile is twisted with suppressed tears.

A day later and twelve weeks early, Howard Walsh III is delivered by emergency caesarean section. Grandma Shirley, whom I meet on my way to the car, is unable to give me any details beyond the fact that he is expected to live and that he weighed eight hundred sixty-five grams at birth. Karen is also being kept in for observation, and she—Shirley—feels it would probably be too much for Karen if they all went to visit her all the time.